Given Turkey's interest in stability near its borders and protecting the Crimean Tatars, to whom Turks are related, Turkey's navy should at least be in the area, said Lale Kemal, a prominent journalist and columnist on Turkish military affairs: "[W]hile Turkey should and is avoiding taking any unilateral provocative military measures against Russia, it should reinforce its fleet in the Black Sea region, bringing some of the warships in the Mediterranean and the Aegean to this sea, too, instead of starting a long journey around the Cape of Good Hope for the purpose of prestige."

But Can Devrim Yaylali of Bosphorus Naval News is more positive: "This deployment is one of most meticulous prepared foreign deployments of Turkish Navy and a text book example how nations can use their military to gain affection abroad.... if we cannot spare 2 frigates and one corvette out of our fleet of 16 frigates and 8 corvettes, then something is not correct," he writes.

Lale Kemal, a Turkish journalist, captured the exchanges very well in a piece for the Daily Zaman on 8 December.
If she leaves you with the impression that the discussions were not just intense, but also most stimulating, then I can confirm they were.

Now we are talking about preparing the public psychologically for dealing with these problems in a different way," said Lale Kemal, a political analyst based in Ankara and a columnist for the English-language newspaper Today’s Zaman.

"More important than any legal change is to prepare the public to accept that we should normalize our relations with Armenia, and deal with the Kurdish problem because these are in Turkey’s interest," Kemal added.